Quality Assurance in Software Development from its Root

I checked the V-Model of software development again a couple of days ago during my holidays. (For example have a look to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Model_%28software_development%29). The model in general is very helpful to explain different levels of testing and their meaning. It is a difference whether I use unit testing to check different functions of the software or integration testing to check the system as whole to check the different parts working together. From functional point of view this V-Model is a good model, but it lacks the most basic building block of software: The source code itself.

Let us take car manufacturing as an example. The V-Model tells us to specify the basic requirements like the car needs to be able to go from A to B with four passengers and a big trunk. We specify then the system design like it is a person car which has a certain size and shape and go down via engine design to details like the different parts of the engine. We take the requirements and design everything from top to bottom by separating more and more smaller building blocks which are separated again until we end up with the most basic building blocks like screws, nuts and bolts. The test goes in production the other way around. First the screws, nuts and bolts are checked for their correct size before they are put into an engine for example. The engine is tested before it is put into the car and so on.

But, when we look to the car manufacturing, there is something which is still missing. It is the part where engineers think about the maintainability of the car. They already think during design phase of new car models about their maintainability. It would be a catastrophe if a mechanic has to dis-assemble the whole car just to change the front light bulb. (In my car I need to walk my way up to the front light starting from the front wheel! So they did not do a good job here…)

In software development it is the same. We think about the correct behavior of the code, but we forget, that we need to maintain the code in future and we also need to develop it further. So maintainability is a big deal, too. Here we need to pay more attention on software architecture, design and source quality to not block our development for further functionality. It is even more obvious, that we need to do this, when we think about the fact, that the source code of the current product is the base for all following products.